Teaching in the local villages of Jaisalmer is challenging for a number of reasons, but I would like to discuss just 2 of them today. The first is the language barrier: P2 volunteers speak English with a few phrases from 'standard' Hindi, most project executives (Indian IDEX staff who work with volunteers) speak English and 'standard' Hindi, and the children speak limited 'standard' Hindi and a local dialect of their regional variety of Hindi - Rajasthani. Thus, while we can do outrbest to teach English vocabulary, explaining new methods in mathematics is near impossible, no matter ho creative and visual our attempts. I was surprised that 2 people from the same country can have such difficulty in communicating, but it's not too shocking given the sheer size of India in comparison to somewhere like the UK and given the children's lack of exposure to other dialects through media/travel. Although dialect and accent variation occurs in the UK (obviously to a much lesser degree than it did 100 years ago and than it does in India today) children in the UK do grow up learning a standard form, such as Standard English, through early education, exposure to children's books, TV etc,  and this occurs simutaneously with learning their local dialect. The children I teach are aged 6-10, so I don't know what their 'standard' Hindi will be like in a few years time, but surely a fluent knowledge of spoken and written Hindi would be required for Higher Education. With the help of our project executive, teaching maths is not impossible and we are starting to teach new material so we hope to notice progression in the next few weeks.

The second thing that makes teaching difficult is cultural differences. On a basic level, you need to know which words are appropriate to the children's every day lives. For example, teaching the 'b' sound with words such as 'bag' and 'ball' would be less confusing than trying to teach the words 'beef' and 'band'. More importantly though, some cultural differences result in poor education, which is an issue for development in India today. Children often come to school looking after their younger sibling and a child's attendance often seems dependent on their home life - e.g. a young girl may not come to school if her mother needs extra help in the home that day. Since girls in many communities in India are ultimately expected to marry, have children and run a household, education for young girls is not deemed that important and thus it is not surprising that the number of boys in the classroom is much larger than the number of girls. 

Gender inequality is very prevalent in India and through research I have learnt about occurrences such as bride burning, dowry death, female feoticide and other such horror stories which occur in India every day. In my local school of Soron Ki Dhani, although I have not heard of any such occurrences, I do notice simple every day examples of gender inequality: lack of girls in class, quiet nature of female teachers/students and I was surprised to see that during a sports day event, one of the girls' races required contestants to thread a needle as quickly as possible. However, I am pleased to note that Soron Ki Dhani's new Headteacher is a woman and I hope that seeing women in authority will inspire some of the girls in the village to think of opportunities beyond the home, if not for themselves then for their daughters.